5 tips to improve our games and your scores.

evelopers, we wouldn't want to switch places with you for a second (well, Luke and Che did, but that's because they got paid lots of money to post on message boards), but we feel it's time to give you some necessary pointers. We don't like complaining about this stuff any more than you like hearing us bitch. It's heartbreaking for everyone involved when an otherwise great game stumbles over the same easily avoidable crap. If you ever see us dock points from your score for one of these, don't say we didn't warn you.

1. Unskippable Cut-scenes

Cut-scenes are fine, no problems there. I'd much rather actually be playing a game 99 percent of the time, but sometimes I don't mind wasting a minute to go "oooooh, airships." And then there are the times that I just plain goddamn don't want to. Maybe I already played through this thing once. Maybe the voice acting is embarrassing to the point that I want to mute the TV on the off-chance anyone nearby might suspect that I'm enjoying it. Maybe I just wanted to play the game more. I can appreciate that making little movies to pepper through the game probably cost a lot of money and effort and I'm a right dick for wanting to compromise the artistic vision of the thing by pressing the Start button, but making it impossible to just skip the things isn't by any means going to increase my enjoyment.

Bonus points for anyone who actually puts an unskippable scene right after a checkpoint. And by bonus points I mean I just traded you in, Manhunt 2.

2. Save Points

Which brings us to this. Nobody should ever be faced with the prospect of saying "right after I get to a save point" when someone is calling you to bed. Actually, you deserve whatever happens if you ever actually say that, but the temptation shouldn't exist. In the age of hard drives there aren't many sound technological reasons why I can't save my game at any time. It's even possible to do it without screwing up the difficulty. Not every game is going to be as good when faced with the quicksave-quickload abuse that got me through Half-Life, but you can have the option of a less-permanent quicksave that's wiped after you load it, leaving me to rely on actual save points for making progress. It's a feature more commonly included in portable games, where it's pretty much a given that you're going to have to ditch your progress when you need to get off the bus. The security of my home is no less prone to interruption, however, and sometimes I'm just plain done with something and don't want to continue slogging toward an unknown point when I'll be free to stop without having to leave my Xbox on overnight to wear down its delicate parts while heating my apartment.

And for the love of sanity, don't make the inconvenience of saves an actual gameplay mechanic. Lunar: Eternal Blue made you spend points that could be used for character improvement on saving the game. Resident Evil made ink ribbons a depletable resource. Dead Rising went and made itself a pain in the ass for the sake of artistry. And in every case it just plain made the game less fun.

3. Quick-Time Events

If a significant part of your game is indistinguishable from something Ralph Baer patented 30 years ago it's probably a fair indication that you need to have a serious think about things. Even if you can find the fine line between boring and unforgiving these still don't have a lot to offer. Sure, some people might like it, but I'm satisfied that most are just tolerating it.

The worst part might be that nobody seems to be able to agree on what to call them. I tend to use either "Quick-Time Events," "Button-pressing minigames," or "Simon-Says nonsense." We should probably reach some kind of consensus, though, considering that one half any given action game these days will consist of these damn things. Seriously, this is about as minimal as gameplay can get while still technically being described as gameplay. They generally don't even contain the elegance and entertaining deaths of a halfway decent laser-disc game from 1989. Rent a copy of Clash of the Titans and get an old Simon off eBay. Congratulations, you just played through half of God of War II.

I understand the desire to fall back on this stuff: You want to do something awesome and cinematic but can't quite figure out how to work it into an actual game. That's fine. Just give me a cut-scene with a little caption reading "We'd like for you to be interacting with things here but we ran out of ideas." At least it removes the possibility of failures requiring me to watch the same scene of an a**hole running from a rolling boulder for the fifth time. Videogames may be a Skinner box, but until they actually start dispensing recreational drugs as a reward I don't really want to be reminded of it so brazenly.

4. Pay to Unlock

It may seem like a purely intellectual difference between charging someone to unlock content stored on a disc versus charging them to download additional content. It's like charging more for a seat at a concert instead of standing space, right? Well, except it's more like selling someone a seat and then making them shell out again before you'll take the tacks off it so they can actually sit down. The end result may be the same, but consumer perception definitely isn't. Especially in the case of, say, The Godfather on 360, where the options you could pay to open up were cheats that were already free in previous versions of the game. The Beautiful Katamari fiasco of having its pay-to-unlock "downloadable" areas already on the disc is maybe worse, if only because it's a case of the disease spreading beyond the confines of Electronic Arts. It may not be entirely fair, but doing this is only going to earn nonstop smartass comments about paying two bucks to unlock "Options" or "Start." Or operating systems where you have to put in a quarter to save files. Or cars that make you swipe your credit card to unlock the special second gear.

5. Because You Can

With all the fancy new whizbang features of the latest round of consoles it probably can't hurt to point out that you don't have to use them. Whenever incorporating a feature, be it tilt control, waggle, touch screen, or whatever, simply ask the question, "Does this work better with a button?" Buttons are boring, sure, but they do their job better than almost anything else in most cases. Otherwise everything in my home would be plugged into The Clapper.

Which isn't to say that the Wii-mote or Sixaxis aren't good for anything. Mario Galaxy unobtrusively uses the Wii Remote for something you just plain couldn't do with buttons, while at the same time leaving buttons to do what they do best. The Sixaxis control in Warhawk is actually pretty slick, and comes with the fantastic ability to turn it the hell off if it's not your kind of thing. Unlike, say, Lair, which contained a more traditional control option before Sony made Factor 5 strip it out.

We're sure there are a lot more than five of these things, and we're likewise sure that there could be some beautiful arguments about the ones we just listed. Gamer or developer, we'd love to hear your complaints or reasons why our own are retarded. Drop us a line at feedback@1up.com or have it out on our message boards.

It's simple really...

YOU may hate water levels, some love them... but the REAL point is... is that games are not "flooded" with this crap, nothing at all like how the above shit has been a tidal wave into most games. THAT's why they didn't list water levels, it's not in most games.